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SPACE WOLVES

The darkness of Angels

Rob Sanders

The Dark City rang with the sounds of battle and butchery. From the serrated spires of High Commorragh to the insanity of the Middle Darkness, the miserable industry of the Old City to the degradation of the Sprawls, things were suffering and dying. It was home to the murderous and those they would murder. It was a hellish cityscape of barbed wonder and torment, in which the alien and the depraved lived, died and enjoyed the perversity of everything inflicted in between. Above the corpse-thick slurp of the city’s rivers, the slave revolts of the gateway ports and the dimensional flux of the shadow districts, the cacophony of death rose.

The arenas spread like a dark cancer out from the razored towers and crooked pinnacles of High Commorragh. Dominating the Sprawls, they drew the bloodthirsty and depraved for kilometres around – alien deviants who filled their worthless lives with their daily fix of death and howled their rabid encouragement from their terraces of black stone. They spat curses in a language of shattered syllables that contorted their thin lips and haunted their features with a wretched fury. They wagered in flesh – that of their slaves, their rivals and their own. They pushed, shoved and screamed at each other as the violence of the arena spread through the auditoria. Knives flashed in the darkness, gutting and slitting. Victims bled their last, stamped into the ground by feverish throngs of xenos intent on commanding the best views – views of alien beasts, the gore festival of traps, and prisoners reduced to the brute desperation of murderous survival.

Krom Dragongaze was one such prisoner. A figure stumbling through the black sand of the arena, the grey of his plate stained crimson with wounds suffered in the course of never-ending battle. He fought through fatigue and loss of blood.

The dark eldar arena was a crowded circus of death. Blinking blood from his eye, and with plaits of copper-coloured hair slick with gore, the Wolf Lord could see bodies of Space Wolves in the arena. Krom tried to summon some anger or indignation. This was no way for Wolves to die. But the Sons of Russ did die this way. All over the galaxy. When a brother of the Space Wolves died, it was not asleep in his cell. He died badly, as some savaged mess on an alien world or bolt-mulched corpse at the foot of a traitor. Still, as deaths went, this was not a good one.

Krom screwed his eye shut. He tried to blank out the pain of loss, his personal agonies and the baying, pale-faced hordes of the auditorium. If he was going to die, he would die like a Wolf. In the moment. Savage and deadly before the end. Opening a bloodshot eye and the shattered remnants of a sizzling optic, the Space Wolf beheld the doom that had been chosen for him.

Whipping up the arena sand into coiled wisps with its anti-gravitic motors, a huge, gladiatorial abomination drifted towards him. Looking like a fat, floating black scorpion, the sickly construct was hunched with a thick, armoured shell – with weaponised claws and rearing tail. It clanked and crunched with the rancid change of internal gearing. It belched a light black smoke, while flasks of unspeakable fluids bubbled in the shell-ports. It was ramshackle in nature and dripping with the filth of past atrocities, but nonetheless the monstrosity gave the impression of indomitable efficiency.

The thing seemed unhurried, as though relishing the howls of encouragement and bloodthirsty expectation from the audience. A macabre fusion of pallid flesh and murderous machine, Krom’s opponent was a semi-sentient torture device – a twisted thing that knew only the delights of a slow death and success measured in screams. It existed to inflict myriad agonies. Festooned with tools of pain, it appeared to Krom less as a gladiatorial killer than a cybernetic butcher, intent on chopping him up a piece at a time until there was nothing left.

Krom spat blood at the arena sand and clenched his fists so hard the joints cracked. Spent. Battered. Doomed. The Space Wolf’s hands itched for weapons that were not there. His plate, once a thing of beauty, was a rattling wreck. All he had was the nature of the beast that clawed at his soul and growled to be released.

‘It’s all I need…’ Krom hissed through bloodied lips.

The Wolf Lord didn’t wait for his opponent. He weaved across the arena, his boots crunching in the black sands as he stepped lightly through the dead, giving the pain engine’s flesh-fused weaponry some difficulty in tracking him. The alien deviants in the audience whooped their savage expectations.

As Krom ran towards the half-machine, he felt the thing betray a moment of primal uncertainty. Things the size of a Space Wolf didn’t usually go on the attack. They usually ran screaming from its scything hook and liquifiers. The Wolf Lord would not. As he took his last few steps, he felt his hearts beat in time with whatever stitched fusion of piston-plugs and muscle pumped wretched filth around the pain engine’s veins. He felt for its movements and intentions.

Allfather’s wounds, Krom thought to himself, this thing is fast. The scything hook cranked around in its bone-socket and flashed for the Space Marine. The crowd seethed with delight. Krom rolled across his pauldron, the hook sparking off his ruined backplate. The momentum carried him to his feet just in front of the pain engine’s armoured head. The Space Wolf smashed his fist down at the metal beast. He hit it again and again, his gauntleted knuckles scuffing and cracking against the thick helm. The engine clunked, whirred and gushed hydraulic fluids as it drifted back. Krom’s bare knuckles had barely dented the plate, however, and the thing came at him with the nozzles of its claw.

The Wolf Lord did not want to find out what came out of such weapons. Flipping head over boots, Krom landed messily on the sand, just clear of the nozzles. Such a demanding manoeuvre required strength and concentration and the punishing arena fights had stripped him of both.

Again, Krom had a moment to appreciate the monstrous engineering of the pain engine and its recoiling reflexes. Striking out with the nozzled limb while turning on its whirring gravitic motors, the pain engine swung around a set of chain-flails attached to the bottom-plate of the weaponised claw. Running on retractable chains, weighted hooks tore around in an expanding arc. Where they got purchase, the flails ripped sections of plate from Krom’s back and embedded themselves in the slabs of muscle about the back of the Space Wolf’s shoulders. His pack sparked with the damage inflicted by the cruel hooks.

The hooks sank deep and burned inside his body with some kind of smeared poison. Krom roared, although he was not surprised. Every razor-sharpened edge or cruel point in this foetid, alien place seemed laced with some kind of burning residue or mind-clouding toxin. It was all part of the lethal nature of this dread city. His limbs felt stricken. His breathing was laboured and his hearts thumped to an irregular rhythm. His mind was an addled ache, struggling to stay conscious. Whatever the venom was, it was overcoming his engineered body’s ability to resist its perilous effects. Krom knew that the venom was unlikely to kill him. The pain engine would do that eventually. Like everything else in the crowded coliseum, the venom was a form of theatre. It reduced the transhuman perfection of humanity’s finest to a dazed hulk – a tranquilised beast to be played with for the audience’s satisfaction. Once the gladiatorial machine had shown off its skills and clunking supremacy, however, the mob would demand death. Something spectacular.

Turning, Krom did the only thing he could – he grabbed the chains. With a wild fury, Krom leaned into the agony of the embedded hooks and hauled the chains around. The pain engine began to move, its anti-gravitic motors causing it to drift around. Without legs or tracks, the monstrous fusion of flesh and machine had no traction on the arena sands and floated around with the centrifugal force of the Wolf Lord’s swing. The thing gushed rank liquids through its lines and streamed smoke. It swung out further until suddenly the chains locked, running their course.

Krom felt a tortuous tug through the running lines. Breathing deep and clenching his teeth, he prepared himself for the worst. Letting go of the chain-flails, Krom allowed the drifting bulk of the pain engine to fly off towards the arena wall. The embedded hooks tore free through the Space Wolf’s flesh and suit, pulling him off his feet and into an ugly fling across the sand. As the hooks and chains retracted, the pain engine struck the wall. Bouncing off black stone, the thing’s shell casing split.

Dark eldar spectators ran to the arena edge to look down on the damage. Krom tried to get up. Muscle raged red hot across his back. Strips of skin hung down through shattered plate. All the while the Space Wolf’s mind swam with the plethora of poisons his genetically engineered body was trying to process. He saw the pain engine belch smoke and eject some kind of liquid effusion from its cybernetic body in a squirting stream. The thick fluid hissed on the sand.

While clutching his back, Krom gestured with the fingers of his other hand for the pain engine to try again. The arena crowd went wild. Krom couldn’t tell whether his actions were being celebrated or reviled. It didn’t matter. He was dead for certain now. All about him he felt the weight of his plate. His damaged pack was faltering and the powered suit dying. He would be soon to follow.

The pain engine rattled towards him. Its hook glinted through old blood and filth, still impossibly sharp. Chain-flails snapped back into place and the pair of nozzles forming the claw of the other appendage dribbled a foul concoction in deviant anticipation. The drips and slurps created smoking pits in the sand, giving Krom the impression of some kind of acid.

As it drifted at speed towards him, the pain engine’s tail contracted and the screw-shaped barrel spat a stream of static at the Space Wolf. Krom dived to one side. It was an ugly manoeuvre, the Space Wolf driving his suit on with the pure brute force of his body. He turned to see the static thrash at the sand where he had been standing. Rolling again in the sluggish suit, the Wolf Lord couldn’t avoid a second, silent blast. The horrific weapon made no sound, but Krom was noisy enough for the both of them as the static hit him in the chest. He fell back spasming and screaming. His body was wracked with the excruciating agony the weapon had visited upon him.

Krom clenched a ceramite fist out in front of him. His whole body trembled with pain, and his suit was like an anchor dragging him down. His teeth chattered uncontrollably. He punched the sand and roared the agony away. As the effect of the weapon began to fade, Krom’s blurring vision returned to clarity. The flat of the merciless hook flashed before his face, smashing him to one side. Krom forced his faltering plate on. He crawled underneath the metal beast, feeling the pulse of the gravitic motors wash over him. The thing turned on the spot, as Krom somehow got to his feet and staggered away.

He heard a discharge of liquid as something spat from the appendage nozzles. Krom tried an evasion but failed. Without his powered reflexes he was merely a Space Marine buried in ceramite. Poison, exhaustion and blood loss were taking their toll. Sliding on the sand, the Space Wolf only half managed to avoid the liquifiers. The foul concoction spattered ahead of him, turning the arena floor to a cloud of steam.

Some of the liquid struck his pauldron and arm, however, and began to eat through the ceramite. While his plate hissed furiously near his face, Krom tore at the seals and locks of the pauldron and plate sections. There was no time for ritual or respect. Hooking his gauntlet under the shoulder plate he ripped it off before clawing the ceramite from his upper arm. He felt the flesh-burrowing burn of several droplets that had eaten their way through. Skin, muscle and bone seethed and a feral roar issued from the Wolf Lord.

He stumbled away from the engine, trying to clear his pain-addled brain just long enough to enact some kind of retaliation. He didn’t get a chance to. The metal monstrosity drifted up behind Krom and, firing the stinger pod on its tail, once more blasted a static stream of agony into the Space Marine.

Krom roared, stricken and held there by the agonies coursing through the entirety of his body. The pain engine wasted no time in angling its hook. Coming up behind the paralysed Wolf Lord, it brought the hook up through his ruined plate and back flesh with a sickening thud. Lifting Krom Dragongaze up on the brutal weapon, the pain engine turned, idling on its gravitic motors. It presented Krom and his suffering to the crowds for inspection. For entertainment.

The sounds of disappointment from the crowd rose to the darklight suns hanging in the Commorrite sky. The cut-glass syllables of abuse rained down on the arena. Improvised missiles pranged off Krom’s plate and the engine’s metal shell while members of the audience demonstrated their detestation by tearing off cloaks and presenting weapons – as if they were going to climb down into the arena. They were stopped, however, by a cordon of coliseum guards: warrior females dressed in leathers.

The Space Wolf could not tell whom the crowd were disappointed with – him for failing or the pain engine for providing them with entertainment not twisted enough for their appetites. Allowing his agonised gaze to travel up from the commotion, up through the spiteful ranks of the arena audience, Krom could make out the sheltered box manned by slave-servants and coliseum guards. Ragged banners streamed from the structure depicting a serrated shadow, the symbol of the queen’s coliseum cult. The queen, who had been absent until now, was summoned back to her throne by the hollering of her audience. If she wanted to remain in power, she had to make sure they were getting a good show. Krom bridled at the sight of her. She was clad in extravagant barbed leathers, the uniform of a gladiatrix. Her theatrical headdress revealed eyes steely with focus, while her bodysuit left little to the imagination. She stared down at the Wolf Lord as the pain engine presented its offering. The decision was hers.

Krom faded in and out of consciousness. The pain was unbearable. He had barely the strength to open his eyes and poison raged through his body, afflicting his mind. His limbs felt like lead, his suit was dead and his movements on the hook an agony.

The queen hesitated over the decision.

The terraces of the coliseum were growing riotous. Dark eldar flashed the sharpness of their teeth and blades, savagely pushing one another. There seemed to be a difference of opinion regarding the quality of the day’s entertainment. Female guards in leathers, sporting pistols with long, tapering barrels, were moving through the mobs of disgruntled xenos, ready to mercilessly put down any rioting. With the coliseum in uproar, discontent infectious and the audience seconds away from becoming part of the entertainment, the dark queen had little choice but to act.

Giving a signal of savage disdain, the queen ordered a section of prisoner cages opened. With bars parting and a hydraulic wall of spikes moving through the cells, more prisoners were forced out onto the arena sands. Crucified upon the hook and held high above the arena floor, Krom Dragongaze beheld his replacements.

Part of him hoped for Space Wolves – although he would take no solace in his brothers being thrust into this arena of torture and humiliation – but he could hear his Drakeslayers roaring their fury and throwing themselves at the bars of cages that would not break. They had not been let loose.

The prisoners were a miserable gathering, mostly humans, emaciated, dressed in rags and showing signs of terrible mistreatment. There was a lone eldar, horribly scarred but stoic. Krom spotted a servant of the Machine God in rust red robes, limping on a shattered bionic. All torturer’s fodder for the pain engine. Then Krom saw them. The dark queen’s gambit. Three transhumans, like himself. One he recognised as the Dark Angels chaplain he’d seen a few times being brought to and from the arena. His filthy white vestments were draped over his battle-scarred black plate, the hood pulled up to partially conceal his distinctive skull helm. With him was one of his brothers, a librarian in blue armour.

The monster advancing from the furthest cage might have once been a Space Marine but he was no angel of the Emperor. The armoured figure was decked in spikes and the perversity of blood red plate. A Chaos Space Marine uncaged. A World Eater let off the leash. His face-flesh was daemon red and a single horn erupted out of the side of his head, winding about his skull like a crown. He had the fixed smile of a maniac, drunk on the violence to come. Violence he fully intended to inflict in the name of his fell patron.

Marching up to the priest of Mars, the World Eater smashed the hobbling construct to the sand with obvious relish. Sinking probing fingers into the base of the priest’s back, the Chaos Space Marine ripped the priest’s spine up out of cybernetic flesh. The metal spine dripped with blood and oil and carried with it an armoured cranium housing the victim’s half-brain and cogitator. Shaking wires and interfaces loose, the World Eater took a few experimental swings with his improvised flail. As he marched for the pain engine, Krom had no doubt that the maniac had every intention of destroying the monstrous machine – and then everyone else.

The pain engine lowered its hook and allowed Krom to slide off. Hitting the sands like a pile of scrap, the Wolf Lord let out a bellow of agony. The mobile torture machine drifted overhead, advancing towards its new victims. It would no doubt return later to inflict further horrors on him, the Space Marine thought, for the crowd’s edification and entertainment.

Krom summoned reserves of strength he didn’t know he had. He felt as though the hook had split him in half. Like an infant animal, he tried to stand. He staggered and fell. He could do it, but it was agony. He crashed back down on the sands in the pain engine’s gravitic wake. Everything hurt. Poison coursed through his veins. His shoulder still seared with the acid working its way through his flesh, and his back felt as if a red hot iron had been thrust into it.

He heard screams. Prisoners were dying. The dark eldar pain engine was nothing if not an artist. Like a true gladiatorial showman and torturer, it had zeroed in on the weak for the entertainment of easy kills. It instinctively knew the transhuman prisoners would be more of a challenge and that therefore their suffering should be left until last.

Dragging his forehead off the sand, Krom witnessed what happened when you faced the xenos pain engine without the benefit of a Space Marine’s engineered body and training. Men died horribly. The monstrous fusion of flesh and machine wanted to show off the full range of its torturer’s tools. Prisoners were hooked through the belly, the scything blade ripping slowly up through the sternum and out through the jaw. They were shredded by the poisoned hooks of the arm-mounted chainflails. Some bled to death on the sand, while others were dragged across the ground by chains. Several were left to tremble, convulse and die where they lay as the poison ravaged their mere human constitutions.

Spitting sand from his lips, Krom saw that the cruel xenos audience were satisfied. The queen’s gamble seemed to have paid off. The conflict on the terraces had given way to masochistic delight. Those spectators eager for blood were getting it. Those demanding more challenge and torment for their time and coin were back on the edge of their seats with expectation. Even the leather-bound guards had stopped to soak up the death and suffering.

The screams grew louder, echoing about the coliseum and rising above the city as the pain engine deployed its other instruments of torture. Prisoners either distracted by former abuses or fixed to the spot with present terrors were sprayed down with acid from the engine’s liquifier guns. Like wax sculptures, the thrashing victims dribbled to the sand to form puddles of red and white. Within seconds there was little left of them but the echo of their dreadful suffering.

For a moment it looked like the eldar might put up a fight, but then the xenos decided to run. He shouldn’t have, Krom decided, as for the relish of the audience’s racial hatred, the pain engine hit him again and again with the agonising static from the screw-shaped barrels mounted upon its overhanging tail. The ghoulish dark eldar were treated to the prisoner scratching at himself on the ground, experiencing more pain than he could bear. After an appropriate show of agony, the prisoner died of his torments.

As the last of the human prisoners turned and ran from the pain engine, the wretch found himself face to face with the World Eater. Swinging his metal skull around on its titanium spinal column like a morning star, the Chaos Space Marine stove in the prisoner’s skull. The victim fell before the spiked might of the World Eater, and the traitor splattered the prisoner into the sand with stamps of his gore-speckled boots.

As the two Dark Angels looked on, the gladiatorial pain engine glided up between them and the Blood God’s champion. The Interrogator-Chaplain offered an open gauntlet towards the World Eater to indicate that the pain engine was all his. The maniac’s smile broadened – a simultaneous acknowledgement of the offer and the fact that he was looking at a dead man.

The World Eater broke into a powered run. As the pain engine accelerated to meet him it reached out with its hook. Smashing the limb to one side with his flail, the Chaos Space Marine began to beat the machine back furiously. Ducking beneath a storm of lacerating hooks, the World Eater allowed the chain-flails to pass overhead before hammering the engine with the reinforced cranium of the tech-priest. The xenos audience screeched with excitement and pain lust.

As sparks flew from the liquifier appendage, the traitor’s improvised weapon failed him, the metal skull detaching from the priest’s blood-slick spine. Stamping at the pain engine with his boot, the World Eater seemed unstoppable. The brute became a feverish storm of powered kicks and punches. With a kick knocking the gladiatorial machine back on its gravitic field, the maniac picked the metal cranium up from the sand, carrying the weapon like a primitive might a rock. The stinger pod on the engine’s tail recoiled, sending a stream of static torment at the Chaos Space Marine. The World Eater didn’t move.

‘Again!’ the traitor roared, an infernal echo to his voice. The weapon seemed to do nothing to the monster. The cybernetic menace blasted the World Eater a second and a third time, each time to bawling encouragement from its opponent.

The World Eater yelled and ran at the clanking contraption. Knocking aside the engine’s flaying hook with the metal skull, he proceeded to smash at the armoured shell until the cranium too came apart in a shower of circuits and brains. His maniac’s smile now horribly contorted with rage, the World Eater grabbed the side of the pain engine. Pushing upwards with a furious heave, the Chaos Space Marine flipped the construct over.

Without the stability of its gravitic motors, the horrific fusion of flesh and instrument of torture landed on the thick plate of its hunched back. Sparks flew and the mechanism belched black smoke. It rolled across the sands, each time attempting to right itself. With gravitic motors getting a fix on the ground, the pain engine came to a stop. Shell-mounted flasks were smashed and the monstrosity’s hull sizzled and steamed with its own foul fluids. The liquefier appendage showered the sand with sparks and the stinger pod hung at a crooked angle on its segmented metal tail.

Krom watched as the impossible happened. The World Eater wasn’t finished. He stormed towards the pain engine, intent on ripping the gladiatorial machine apart. He would probably have done so, if it hadn’t been for the stuttering stream of acid the pain engine spattered into his face. With its mechanism damaged and feed lines broken, all the monstrous machine could send the Chaos Space Marine’s way was the acid left in its liquefier guns. The World Eater had never screamed before but as the acid spray ate through his face, he heard the sound of his own suffering echoing in his ears.

‘Get him up,’ Krom heard from behind him. ‘Get him up.’

It was the two Dark Angels. As the brother in blue put Krom’s arm across his back, his compatriot grabbed his other arm and hauled the Space Wolf off the floor. Krom tried to shrug the Dark Angels off him but his heavy plate, its sluggish servos and fibre bundles resisted.

‘Can you fight?’ the Interrogator-Chaplain said, his syllables clipped with a nobility of purpose.

‘My plate has no power,’ Krom growled, almost like an accusation.

‘Can you fight?’ the Interrogator-Chaplain demanded again, his courteous tone laced with authority.

‘Have you ever met a Wolf who wouldn’t?’ Krom bit back.

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Published in Great Britain in 2015.
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